First week of March fingered for iPad 3 announcement

When will the iPad 3 arrive in our grubby little hands? There have been plenty …

There have been many rumors about the launch of Apple's next-gen iPad, but the first substantial bit of info comes courtesy of All Things D. According to sources speaking to the publication, the iPad 3 will be introduced at an event in San Francisco during the first week of March—the same week the iPad 2 was announced in 2011.

Rumors have been all over the map as for what the iPad 3's specs might be. It has been generally accepted at this point that it will come with a higher-resolution "retina" display, but others have pointed to upgraded cameras, a slightly thicker body, a quad-core processor, and even possibly LTE support. (According to All Things D's sources, some of those elements are indeed correct: "A device similar in form factor to the iPad 2, but running a much faster chip, sporting an improved graphics processing unit, and featuring a 2048 X 1536 Retina Display—or something close to it."

(Another source speaking to The Verge on Wednesday claimed the iPad 3 won't have a quad-core processor after all, though it will have an improved GPU.)

This makes sense: the timing on this falls right where I would expect for this event. When the iPad 2 was announced last year, the company made it available to the public within a week or so, which would again make sense for this year's announcement. Assuming the first-week-of-March speculation ends up being true, that's less than a month away. If the iPad 3 is announced with specs that rub you the right way, will you buy?